Scottie Scheffler: It Doesn’t Take Perfect Golf to Win

All PGA Tour players go through a learning curve when they first start, and Scottie Scheffler learned golf’s most important lesson at the WM Phoenix Open: He doesn’t have to play perfect golf to win.

Now he’s in LA at the Genesis Invitational to see if he can do it all over again. Winning did take something out of him emotionally.

“I’m feeling pretty tired right now, so it would be pretty frustrating to come in second and still be this tired,” he said about his first victory.

Scheffler was having problems in the final round, and for a while thought he had played himself out of it.

“In final rounds, I always viewed it as I had to play kind of this perfect version of golf.”  – Scottie Scheffler

“I just kept telling myself there’s going to be bumps in the road, and I gave myself — on Sunday — way too many bumps,” he admitted.

Scheffler said he had four bogeys and that all of them were as a result of trying to force something on the course.

On the 5th, he wasn’t comfortable with the yardage he had, but he went for the pin anyway.  Didn’t work.  He found the “native area”, otherwise known as the desert.

He bogeyed the 7th by missing a four-footer for par.  Then he tried to do too much at the 8th to make up for it. Didn’t work.

The back nine was surprisingly clean. Just one bogey at the par 3, 12th, caused mainly because he missed the green with his tee shot. But he had four birdies after that and a final round of 67 to get into a playoff with Patrick Cantlay.

“It’s something different in the final round when I’m trying to fight to beat everybody in the field,” Scheffler said. “It’s a lot easier on Thursday and Friday when you’re just fighting to get back to par or 5th or 10th place or whatever.”

He said that for whatever reason, he just didn’t let the bogeys in the final round bother him as much as they had in previous tournaments.

“In final rounds, I always viewed it as I had to play kind of this perfect version of golf,” he admitted.

Perhaps he was surprised to be in such a good position after telling his caddie during the first two rounds that his scoring was poor. He felt great, he noted, but he couldn’t post a number.

“I was really fighting the cut line on Friday afternoon,” he said. “I had to make like a six- or seven-footer on 7 for par to stay at 2 under, which was the cut line.”

But he also made a 40-footer the next hole for birdie and got up and down on the 9th. He was afraid the cut line had moved to 3-under par.

“If you would have told me a year ago that I would be making those kind of mistakes and been able to still win the golf tournament, I would have been pretty surprised,” he noted.

According to Scheffler, the lesson he learned from winning last week is that it’s more about coming back from the mistakes than playing perfect golf.

For now, he’s ready to attack Riviera C.C.

“This one is one of the courses where it kind of just ticks you off all week,” he explained.

He thinks it looks like it would be easy to play until you try to play it.  Strangely, he loves it.  Maybe that’s the next thing he’ll learn:  Playing well despite frustrations with a course. That’s a U.S. Open-type lesson.